What exactly does the "erroneous energy" MR error mean?

#1

I do terrible things to shader networks and work primarily with Mental Ray. Occasionally, I hit on errors like:


 RCGI 0.26   822 MB warn   362012: cannot store photon with erroneous energy -9.53082e+028 2.8026e-045 -1.56876e+006
 RCGI 0.23   653 MB warn   362012: cannot store photon with erroneous energy 5.63227e+033 0 -1.5993e+006

It doesn’t stall my renders indefinitely (usually), but it certainly seems to slow things down. Maybe I’m just bad at searching, but I can’t seem to find any references to this error. Does anyone have some information on it? What exactly does it mean? What causes it?

#2

So, I managed to track down what caused it at least. For future reference and anyone whose interested, it turned out I had accidentally connected the outvalue of a misss_fast_skin_maya, instead of its overall color, to a BlendColors Utility.

Silly mistake! I can only assume it created some kind of feedback loop or something that was driving the photons into a frenzy.